15 I 2003 - 23:09 - salio -- plus quam 'aut saliri aut salire volo'

I'll be brief as I'm popping in for only a moment before I get to some work.

I've been writing furiously for the past few nights. Unfortunately, the quality is not at all related to the effort (or -- I fear -- it is too much related to my effort. Why do I have such a hard time judging myself?) I've been playing around with a couple of forms -- rhyme royale and the rondeau --

which reminded me: in the middle of math class today, among the muttering of derivatives, I thought suddenly: '"In Flanders fields" is perfect for the rondeau form. It must be.' I didn't know the entire poem, so I couldn't check it until ten minutes ago, and there it was: the poem in its entire and rondeauific glory. There's some satisfaction in that --

so anyway, I've been playing around with that, and I think that explains some of my absences. There is too that I'm still somewhat unused to the work of school, although I am indeed (as my teacher suggested on my fall semester grades) finding Horace enjoyable -- I think we'll get on quite well.

Segue: over the winter break, a schoolmate of my youngest sister came in from Stockton to spend some time with us because he was bored. I ended up talking to him for some time -- he's in medical school now, yes, but he was a classics major, and after some discussion he asked me if I wouldn't mind his sending an email to his old professor about perhaps opportunities. I think I have summer plans -- the Latin-Greek Institute in New York -- but since I can't say 'no,' and 'un-yes, thank you very much' is somewhat unsatisfying, the email was sent.

And what an email it was! My sister forwarded his message to her, which itself forwarded his professor's reply to his initial email (still with me?). I was particularly struck by the following phrases:

'nifty kid, an excellent cellist and violinist'

'he's very positive, funny, and terrifically nice to be around'

'He is fluent in Chinese, has taken Latin for the last four years, and has

also studied German and French.'

All strike me as containing some sort of exaggeration, and while it's certainly very nice of him to have done and said what he did, I'm not sure where he pulled it from and what the proper response is.

I'm not sure why the personality phrase catches me as much as the other ones -- it's certainly not a matter of debate that I have never taken French, that I don't play the violin (and note that he never heard me play the cello), and that I do not begin to approach fluency in Chinese (perhaps it was the speed with which I found his surname in the character dictionary, but that took a couple of years to learn by itself).

I think this fear that whomever I marry will have gotten by far the worse end of the deal has a great deal to do with this disbelief of mine that I could ever be pleasant to be around. I am often arrogant -- I'm working on it, but not, apparently, well. Perhaps it's that I'm reminded of this so often, or perhaps it was my sister's saying when I was younger, 'Is there anyone you know who can stand to be around you for extended periods of time?' but God. Would it really be that much worse if I could just let myself believe that I'm a nice person?

Sometimes it is terrifying when words release themselves from my memory, refuse to submit to recall and instead send others in their place, forcing me to become adept at periphrasis. I fear that language begins to hate me, the words I love do not love me in turn...

And then sometimes they are simply unclear, as today when I tried to say hello to someone -- but he was next to her, and I had a pen in my mouth, and between the two I was able to get merely an undifferentiated mass of vowels... not strange or new but still somehow surprising to me, that my tongue and brain should be so intimately connected to my genitals...

From that to this: I went to hear Lang Lang play tonight at the symphony. He was -- his tone said so much, his music was going somewhere and there was emotion behind the technique, it was wonderful to have gone. I'll need to mull it over a bit to figure everything out -- his bouncing was a little distracting, but after a little while that didn't matter because he was making Music.

The orchestra sometimes drowned him out, which upset me.

Also on the program was a somewhat sterile Scherzo a la russe (Stravinsky) and a decent Shostakovich 15.

Note to self: when in melancholy mood -- when you have woken up to beautiful glowing light-blue sky and purple clouds over the sleeping city in the east and been nothing but terrified by a yawning foreboding -- then Shostakovich 15 will make you shudder, make you gasp, break you -- but it will not help your mood.

And with that, I sleep.